Keep your email list squeaky clean with Campaign Monitor + Kickbox

Here at Campaign Monitor, our compliance team works around the clock to make sure your emails are getting sent out safely and your sender score is protected, but we can’t always track email address validity. That’s where our partnership with Kickbox comes in. Kickbox makes it easy for you to import your lists from Campaign Monitor, check them for undeliverable or risky addresses (like role, accept all, disposable or free email addresses), select what you’d like to keep/suppress and import a fresh list back into Campaign Monitor.

Any “bad” email addresses that you select to remove will be automatically added to your suppression list in your Campaign Monitor account.

Not only does this affect your list’s health positively, it can also affect your open rates and engagement; real people are much more likely to open, read, and enjoy your emails. Data degradation and list maintenance are real problems for marketers. What starts out as a good email address becomes “bad” the moment someone changes their name, email provider or job. B2B lists tend to degrade faster than B2C lists. Older and larger lists are more prone to data decay. Even double opt-in lists are susceptible to quality problems over time.

“Our focus is supporting marketers by helping them reach the inbox of their customers. The goal has never been to make a bad list look good. Rather, be an element ensuring an opt-in list remains deliverable. Any business, regardless of size, collecting email addresses online as part of their opt-in process can benefit from routine email verification.”

Jack Wrigley, VP of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships at Kickbox.

Benefits of routine email list cleaning

Reduces your risk of getting suspended or blocked by your ISP or ESP

Increases the number of emails that actually make it to your inbox

Saves you money by not sending to bad or low-quality email addresses

Improves email performance across the board

Decreases spam reports

Promotes higher engagement

Kickbox is a tool for email marketers to help gain insights about their lists based on the quality and validity of their email addresses.

See Kickbox in action

Setting up Kickbox to work with Campaign Monitor is easy. As a first step, make sure that you have an updated list in Campaign Monitor that includes all of your contacts. You can read a bit more about how to do this in our help article. We recommend having a single list with multiple segments off of it for more targeted sending, but if your lists aren’t structured this way, you can also send multiple lists through Kickbox for testing.

Kickbox offers you 100 free verifications to test out their service. If your list is larger than 100 subscribers, you have the option to purchase one-time verification credits—starting at $5 for 500 contacts.

How to get started

After you’ve signed up for a Kickbox account, and purchased your verifications, click the Import Email List option in the top right corner of the screen, and select Campaign Monitor from the drop down menu.

This will take you through the process of authorizing Kickbox to access your Campaign Monitor contacts, selecting the list you would like to verify.

Once you’ve imported your list, it will be placed in your verification queue to be processed. Hit the start button and then enjoy watching the real-time updates as Kickbox goes through your list!

Once your list has been verified, the option to download your list will become available. Click the Download button, and select the option to update your Campaign Monitor list.

You will then be given able to choose whether you’d like to remove undeliverable, risky or unknown email addresses—or maybe even all of them! You have complete control. Clicking the Update List button will update your list in Campaign Monitor and move all of those unsavory emails to the suppression list.

Google Hangout: Tips to improve deliverability of your holiday emails

To learn more about best practices for list health, gaining quality subscribers, and even what can qualify an email address as being “risky,” listen to this recording of a recent Google Hangout.